Category: Links Dump

Online civility: between 10,000 cliques and 2 cultures, where’s the neutral ground? : bioephemera “Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the blogosphere abhors a neutral and nonpartisan blog. For whatever reasons, cultural or historical, participants expect partisanship. They want to know if you’re with them or against them; the dedicated communities at various blogs can… Continue reading Links for 2010-05-04

Clive Thompson on Why We Should Learn the Language of Data | Magazine “Statistics is hard. But that’s not just an issue of individual understanding; it’s also becoming one of the nation’s biggest political problems. We live in a world where the thorniest policy issues increasingly boil down to arguments over what the data mean.… Continue reading Links for 2010-05-03

tongodeon: Fun With Secret Questions & Answers “My new bank, Ally Bank, configures a security question and answer for customer service calls. In addition to your SSN, date of birth, and mother’s maiden name they also ask you the question you specify and wait for the answer you’ve provided. This is good, because many standard… Continue reading Links for 2010-05-02

slacktivist: Empathy and epistemic closure “The stupidity of the tea partiers has nothing to do with innate intelligence or with acquired intelligence. It has nothing to do with smartness or brainpower or where anyone falls on the bell curve of Stanford-Binet test scores. It is, rather, a moral stupidity, a moral imbecilism that produces simple… Continue reading Links for 2010-05-01

The Science and Entertainment Exchange: The X-Change Files: Zap! Or, Where Would Science Fiction Movies be Without Lasers? “Science fiction was right on top of this new development and even foresaw it. In 1898, H. G. Wells introduced an invisible but powerful heat ray as the weapon of choice for invading Martians in his story… Continue reading Links for 2010-04-30

Skipping class? NAU high-tech system will know “Students who are thinking about sleeping late and skipping that morning class may have a new incentive to roll out of bed at one Arizona university this fall. Northern Arizona University will install an electronic system that detects when each student with an ID card walks through the… Continue reading Links for 2010-04-29

Enemy Lurks in Briefings on Afghan War – PowerPoint – NYTimes.com “”PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful… Continue reading Links for 2010-04-28

News: Science for Non-Scientists – Inside Higher Ed “Next January, Bard’s science and math faculty – along with postdoctoral students and faculty from other institutions — will try to change all that with the Citizen Science Program, three weeks of science learning modeled on the success of Language and Thinking. Also required of all 500… Continue reading Links for 2010-04-27

Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 163601 (2010): Direct Observation of Coherent Population Trapping in a Superconducting Artificial Atom “The phenomenon of coherent population trapping (CPT) of an atom (or solid state “artificial atom”), and the associated effect of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), are clear demonstrations of quantum interference due to coherence in multilevel quantum systems. We… Continue reading Links for 2010-04-26

One-third of Americans may be obese, but we’re not too fat to fight. – By Daniel Engber – Slate Magazine “Yet fat soldiers are sometimes given the boot for reasons that have nothing to do with their abilities in the field. According to military guidelines, even someone who’s fit as a fiddle can be drummed… Continue reading Links for 2010-04-25